Down at the Automat

The concept of a coin operated cafeteria was born in Berlin where the Quisiana was in operation as long ago as 1900. The Horn & Hardart chain of Automats developed in Philadelphia and New York a few years later and at their peak in the 1940s more than 50 were trading in New York City. In the era of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis this idea must have seemed an inevitable step towards a fully mechanised future where human labour would be concealed where it couldn’t be eliminated. Human contact would be minimised while the human hand hovered behind the scenes and reloaded the rotating dishes as required. For Edward Hopper the automat was a perfect vehicle for his vision of the impersonal in modern life and his 1927 painting of the same name captured the sense of human isolation in the solitary female figure who stares blankly into her coffee cup as if the contents were absinthe. When I visited New York in the late 1960s I took a small step into the future with a handful of nickels and dimes into a Horn & Hardart where the coins were exchanged for a slice of cherry pie that put me in mind of Claes Oldenburg’s re-creation of all-American plenty in the form of slapdash facsimile fruit pies. The automat is another of those deceptive concepts that belong to a future that never quite came to pass and the last example in New York closed in 1991.